The Essentials
- We’ve helped hundreds of founders, produced two dozen challenge programs, and have awarded more than $1M in grants to startups.
- Now we will take our work to the next level. Lever is launching the Massachusetts Founders Network (MFN), a hybrid platform that will help democratize access to acceleration resources for all Massachusetts founders.
Jeffrey Thomas is Lever’s Executive Director and MFN Team Lead.
We’ve been asking startup founders “what do you need?” and “how can we help?” since we opened our doors in 2014. Taking our cues from them, we’ve built a highly rated resource for scalable startups in an unlikely location, North Adams, Massachusetts. In 2020, the pandemic forced us to provide acceleration services remotely and statewide, and we haven’t looked back. We’ve helped hundreds of founders, produced two dozen challenge programs, and have awarded more than $1M in grants to startups.
We love the work we do because we’re so inspired by the founders we help. Most gratifying are those moments when a founder says, “if it weren’t for Lever, I wouldn’t have [fill in the blank]”.
We’ve been able to tailor our support to individual founders from a range of backgrounds, with a range of experience, operating in a range of business categories. About half of the founders we work with are women. Although Lever is located in a region of the state that is more than 92% white, nearly 20% of the founders we work with are people of color. I’m so proud of that.
One entrepreneur of color that we worked with, after a couple of unsuccessful merchandise startups, keyed in on the fact that investors love businesses built to receive “recurring revenues” basically, customers who pay for a product over and over. They then built a SaaS company that offers services so sticky that his average customer lifetime is measured in years. This 30-something founder sold their company last year and is now a “1 percent-er.”
Now we will take our work to the next level. Lever is launching the Massachusetts Founders Network (MFN), a hybrid platform that will help democratize access to acceleration resources for all Massachusetts founders, regardless of their location, their background, or their experience. MFN builds on our experience at Lever with a digital platform to support remote interaction, access to a mix of curated founder resources, and an inclusive peer community.
MFN takes advantage of the new reality that location doesn’t matter. Remote collaboration and distributed teams have become the norm. Historically, founders based in metro Boston have had a substantial advantage over founders located elsewhere in the state. MFN will help better distribute acceleration resources, including investment capital, throughout the Commonwealth, yielding jobs and increased competitiveness statewide.
